


2 tsp

by ferricent



Category: Supernatural
Genre: AU, Bakery, Baking, F/M, Romance, Thingstiel, castiel is a donut
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2012-01-05
Updated: 2012-01-05
Packaged: 2017-10-28 23:24:22
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,519
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/313317
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/ferricent/pseuds/ferricent
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Written for spn_jimmynovak's Novakfest 2011, for lj user metallikirk's prompt: "AU. Jimmy works in a bakery and he falls in love with one of the customers."</p>
            </blockquote>





	2 tsp

**Author's Note:**

  * For [Silent_So_Long](https://archiveofourown.org/users/Silent_So_Long/gifts).



Jimmy Novak has been in love. When he was a forest, he loved the river that ran though him, a vein of water that became a vein of sound in spring. When the cold rains fell in the south of him, and the young things at this roots wrung life from the soaked world, he loved the river. When animals came upon the stream in the shade and forgot---if not his predators---their thirst, he loved the river. And when he burned, willingly, in his prayers to God, and the river was a band of reflected light and the black lines of trees he loved the river.

Jimmy takes a deep breath and the smell of the bakery recreates him. Flour in his fingerprints. Warm rolls baking: the heat of the oven on his face. Sugar: sweet on his front of his tongue, caramel, molasses, honey.

From somewhere, the bell on the shop door rings, and then there is a woman circling the entranceway's display of pink-topped cupcakes like a prizefighter, moving towards the counter, trying to keep everything in the corner of her eye. Mary (breads, specialty letter frosting) is chatting on the phone in the back, a murmur of shocked talk drifting through the door of the kitchen. Jimmy is at once wide awake---two hands, two feet---and the purity of reality invigorates him, braces him.

There is something else, though, not in his eyes.

The woman is before him now, Jimmy Novak, human being. He looks at her, and opens his mouth to speak.

“James Novak, right?”

“Y-yes? Can I... What can I get you?” It takes him a second to find his voice and fall back into the pattern of cook and customer. It is ten AM and they are humans, both humans, three blocks west of the busiest corner of a small city in Illinois. He is a man 85,600 scones away from paying off a property loan, _not_ four hundred acres of mountainous woods. She is a woman who probably just wants to place an order for a cake, not a nymph of the water, beaded from the banks, stepping lightly into a dell of trees.

“We need your help.”

The pattern changes.

She is beautiful, with blonde hair and a gaze that is suddenly locked and forward. _This is Amelia, from church_. Jimmy remembers her. _Amelia Something. Amelia Brown? Amelia Smith?_

“I'm sorry? It's Amelia, right?”

“Amelia. Amelia Winston. Don't think we've ever properly...” She extends from the shoulder and reaches over the glass. Jimmy shakes her hand. She is warm. Jimmy can imagine the shape of her footprints on soil and moss, the touch of her fingers on vine.

“I see you---I've seen you---on Sundays.”

“ _Every_ Sunday.” She smiles. “And at a few charity functions too. You made those lemon sorta... twist bits?” Amelia Winston makes a motion with her fingertips, trying to accurately write some sweet in pantomime. She frowns, becoming lost in her hands. Jimmy is lost too, though he knows precisely what she's talking about.

“Well, thing of it is, the Retreat Committee I'm on wants to put together a cookbook for the parish, profile a few food-savvy members and businesses. A little sponsored literature for the homemaker, that kind of thing. Anyways, we've got about a dozen essays on the art of chicken salad, but our desserts section is horrid slim. Think you might want to contribute a recipe?”

“A recipe? Oh, I, well, I've never written before. Most of my baking is pretty...” Jimmy searches for the word. “Instinctual. I mean, I'd love to help out! I---it's---I can try.”

Jimmy doesn't know why he is flustered and fumbling. There is a feeling in him like the bakery, the hinge of this event is different, a shape unfolded.

“Hey, _I_ burn soup, but I did a little interview work for the newspaper in college. If you could show me the steps, I could probably get it written out for you.”

“Alright... yeah! That could work.”

“You're sure?”

“Of course! When did you want to meet?”

  
**X-X-X-X-X-X-X-X-X-X-X-X-X-X-X-X-X-X-X-X-X**   


That night, when the bakery is closed, Jimmy prepares Castiel. He knows the recipe by heart---English from Latin from Enochian---but he takes time to lay out the ingredients in careful order. Eggs. Milk. Buttermilk. Three drops of distilled water. The steps of the recipe are complicated, and the _mise en place_ of the angel's being demands exactitude. In the light of the last florescent rod, glowing in a corner of the kitchen, Jimmy brings the first egg gently to rest against the sharp edge of the bowl.

With a soft crack, the memory of the storm spills out into him. It had been a mighty gale, a continent of black clouds that breathed rain and wind. The edge which gravity made of air and ocean for his pleasure was a fray, and he was tossed and lifted on the surface of the sea. Salt water filled his planks and he was broken upon a nameless island. The rope lines of his rigging tangled in the splinters and the flotsam of his belly, casks of communion wine bobbing on the misleading tide. _The form, the shipwreck._.

Jimmy staggers with the violence and the joy of the memory. Castiel always returns to him first in visions, then intent, then words. There is an element of Grace that Jimmy knows completes the angel, but he has not tasted that yet. Holding the bowl steady, he tips in a dash of vanilla extract and Castiel speaks.

“Hands work. Mouth. Her beautiful to your _should_.”

Jimmy picks a stray piece of eggshell from the mixture and Castiel's voice comes into grammar.

“I like her.”

“Who, Amelia?” A little less than a half cup of oil is added to a heated pot.

“A cute nose and wants cookies.”

Jimmy frowns at the vial of sugar syrup he has just poured into the batter. The recipe is too sweet tonight. “You're a sap, Cas,” he says playfully, and adds a little salt.

“All the same...” The angel's voice is still soft light, but the saccharinity is gone.

“'All the same' what? She needs a little help with a batch of razz tarts maybe. Or those cinnamon knots. Rings? Anyway, you're reading too much into it.”

Jimmy works the new ball of dough with one hand, kneading, watching the oil for bubbles. He expects some response from the angel---ridiculous, what does a servant of God care about his love life?---but his progress in the recipe elicits only silence. Wiping his hands on his apron, he uncorks a bottle of spiced baking paste, breathing in the scent.

 _Why_ does a servant of God care about his love life?

“Am I to be called, soon?” He peels off a strip of dough and tests the fry pot. More butter.

“Soon!” The oil in the pot hisses sibilantly. “Soon!” That has always been the angel's answer, ever since Jimmy first burned his hands preparing Castiel in his teens. Pressing a ring from the rolled dough, Jimmy follows the recipe's last steps. He can feel the angel fully in the room with him, a sense of mind and power. It feels like he is backstage the world, with a crowd of thousands waiting just behind a curtain.

“Do you remember---” the angel says, and suddenly Jimmy is a whirl of snow.

“Yes.”

Jimmy does not hear himself speak the word. Somewhere, he switches off the range heat and scoops out the little donut to dry. Cinnamon. Sugar. The dim light flickers. Jimmy tries to hold on to the memory, but it fades, and he is back in the little kitchen. James Novak lifts the little pastry to his lips and someone can almost---just almost---taste something like warm marzipan.

“Our father, who art in heaven...” Jimmy places the donut carefully in the sink and pushes it with wet fingers down the disposal. He doesn't finish the prayer, but he knows Cas doesn't mind. One day, he will actually taste Castiel, according to the cipher of the recipe, but not before the angel has said that it is right. He is meant for a great task, he knows, a purpose of body and spirit and heart.

  
**X-X-X-X-X-X-X-X-X-X-X-X-X-X-X-X-X-X-X-X-X**   


Jimmy Novak has been in love. It was an instant of undoing, melting on a bare palm reached out to feel the cold flakes of him, falling gently. Jimmy knew it was love, the whole, last moment of his being. What else could change everything so quickly?

  
**X-X-X-X-X-X-X-X-X-X-X-X-X-X-X-X-X-X-X-X-X**   


Their first attempt at writing out the stuff of Jimmy Novak's baking (cinnamon apple scones), doesn't go so badly, but Jimmy---embarrassed---confesses that the addition of the toasted cornflake butter crust swirls was a decorative flourish, and should not dominate the first four paragraphs (plus footnotes) of instructions, and by the time Amelia has marked out a blue-ink draft from her purple notes, the recipe makes no sense.

  
**X-X-X-X-X-X-X-X-X-X-X-X-X-X-X-X-X-X-X-X-X**   


The second day's attempt becomes something else entirely. Amelia reads her words back to him.

“You took---’Take forty-one raspberries soaked’---”

“Did I actually say 'forty-one raspberries'? That can't be right.”

Amelia holds up her notebook, a brushing a few crumbs from the pages. “Evidence, Jimmy Novak! 'Forty-one raspberries soaked in whole milk and maple syrup.' Then you crush almonds and---wait, I remember this—“ Amelia flips ahead three pages, concentrating. “Then 'roast them in honey butter in the other oven.' Why are there so many steps?”

Jimmy's wrists are covered in soap suds. He shuts off the sink tap with his elbow. “What's in the _first_ oven?”

“The dough. But only to warm it to 125 degrees before you smear on the oil.” Amelia turns the cold water tap and Jimmy begins rinsing the next mixer attachment.

“Right. The dough. Butter, sugar... two eggs?”

“Two and a half and... a half... and a third... and a half cups flour. No! Wait!” Amelia is laughing. “I wrote 'too much flour.'”

Jimmy pretends to glare. He can't keep a straight face. “Well! I think we know whose fault this is.”

Amelia puts on her best shocked expression and then grins. She picks up one of the almond-dough morsels and nibbles at one black-cooked edge, keeping her eyes on him. “Why Mr. Novak,” she lilts, “was I _distracting_?”

It’s comedic, but Jimmy finds he’s almost blushing. He tries to focus on--- _the way her hair falls on the side of her face, near her ears_ \---something that isn’t Amelia Winston, or the way Amelia Winston is looking at him. He tries to listen to his own voice. “Well, I mean... I think _something_ happened.” He dries his hands on a clean towel and keeps his eyes fixed on a row of cooling racks. “And then...” Jimmy lets it trail off.

“It’s alright.” Amelia fills in words, “Do you still want me to come back tomorrow?”

“Only if you want to. Can you? It’s fine, I promise I actually can make...”

“‘Something’?”

“Yeah. Something.”

Jimmy doesn’t know what he wants to say. _Have dinner with me_ , or _Do you want to draw pictures with the frosting gun_ , or _Do you ever daydream and forget you’re not a nebula?_ maybe. Amelia offers him her apron and he holds it with both hands, awkwardly, aware of the space between them. Time flows at pace again.

“Tomorrow, then?”

  
**X-X-X-X-X-X-X-X-X-X-X-X-X-X-X-X-X-X-X-X-X**   


The local brand supermarket in their city has been subtitled “Food, Canned Food, And Tires” for three decades. The building is newer than the sign, the outlet expanse of one unknown family’s products trinity. It is a dense, sufficient complex, and although Jimmy only handles a percentage of the butter-in-bulk ordering for the bakery, he has always been able to find the ingredients for Castiel here. The aisles are lit in cold white even in the daytime, and the thematic sales designs alter everything, just slightly, so when Jimmy spots Amelia near a pyramid of bargain salsa it takes him a minute to recognize her. He looks down at his cart. Eggs. Milk. Buttermilk. Two water bottles. A pack of matches (free if you ask). There is a kind of a memory in the rote order of the shopping already, one that Jimmy himself is familiar with.

It becomes the world.

Amelia streak-of-red-where-there-was-blue sees him first, lines-of-blue-and-black-running-together and waves at where his cart peeks out of the dairy aisle. Lines-of-blue-and-black-running-together waves back---a motion of new colors over the separation. Streak-of-red-where-there-was-blue moves along, and then Jimmy is not a painting. He closes his eyes, trying to summon the recollection, the cadmium rot fingers tearing through his colors, scratching down to his canvas, rejecting his visual form. He looks for the red-where-there-was-blue, the memory of it, but she is gone.

Jimmy breathes. Every fourth tile (he counts them, slowly) is a dull teal. The sale flyers: yellow. He grips the handle of his cart a little tighter and continues his stitched path through the cold foods section.

  
**X-X-X-X-X-X-X-X-X-X-X-X-X-X-X-X-X-X-X-X-X**   


Mary goes to a baptist church two times a month in another part of the county, but she offers Amelia handwritten instructions for a “crusts cut” rye bread. Amelia thanks her, spells Mary’s name correctly, and invites her to every parish dinner from that moment until the end of time.

  
**X-X-X-X-X-X-X-X-X-X-X-X-X-X-X-X-X-X-X-X-X**   


“How'd you get into baking in the first place?”

It is perfect noon, and the sun of the equinox glints off the aluminum trimmed tables and the polished highlights of display glass. They are waiting for their latest transcripted dish (apricot bars) to come out of the oven. Jimmy has already apologized for the way they looked when they _entered_ the oven, but he isn't dwelling on their odd failure.

Jimmy wonders what it would be like to tell Amelia about Cas, about waking up with the tip of his fingernail missing and one long, red, run-on recipe in Latin scrawled on his closet door. About praying---truly praying---to understand. The fear of it, trying to shut out everything that wasn’t the silence of God. Translating the final _consumere_. Or about when Jimmy---who'd never cooked anything past toast in his life---broke into the Home Ec room of his high school one two AM and measured out the teaspoons and cups of holy memory for the first time. Instead he says:

“Baking was... it was always the thing I wanted to be doing. In my last year of high school I started getting really into it. I'd get up when it was still dark and make biscuits or flapjacks, and when breakfast---that I’d made---tasted good it meant my whole day was going to be great. When I was studying marketing at the university, I wanted to be baking. When I graduated, I wanted to be baking. When I got my first job, I... wanted to be baking. Sometimes when I’m asleep, I want to be baking! I've had dreams that were just... giant dough mixers, sacks of flour packed like sandbags and then...”

Jimmy makes the motion with his hands “Whoosh! A wave of syrup comes crashing in and I wake up.”

“Sounds sticky.”

Jimmy grins. “It’s not so bad. The _real_ nightmares involve sprinkles.”

There’s no better sound than Amelia Winston laughing, and when the oven chimes, just then, it’s too perfect for Jimmy to question why he’s so lucky, what these moments really mean, or why their simple apricot bars taste like dirt.

  
**X-X-X-X-X-X-X-X-X-X-X-X-X-X-X-X-X-X-X-X-X**   


“It just neeuhs---” Jimmy loses the consonant in a bite of dry dough. It is three PM, but Jimmy has closed the shop early so that he and Amelia can practice. This is the end of their first week working together, trying to find functional material for the cookbook, but so far, nothing has been satisfactory. Mary suggested they make chocolate swirl cookies (“ _Anyone_ ” can make chocolate swirl cookies.”), and Amelia nominated broken bits of Kit Kat bars for sweetener, and then “Butterscotch!” and then she did her best to dictate her vision for The Most Perfect Dessert to Jimmy, working the ovens and the dough. Jimmy didn’t mind that, not even a little.

“It should taste like... good things! _Most_ good things.”

Jimmy had nodded seriously. “That’s sounds like a pretty good rule.”

Dough like a sponge. But crispy on the bottom. Flaky crispy. Flaky crispy on the top as well. As warm as summertime. With strawberries. The raw lumps look absolutely fantastic. The oven is a welcoming heat.

Amelia stares dejectedly at the remaining grid of their results. Her hair is tied back, and there is a spot of flour on her cheek. Jimmy suddenly realizes how silly he must look, trying to sample dough, throw away tasting ladles and handle three hot trays with one oven mitt all at once. He turns back to Amelia, meeting her eyes. “It just needs more...” Jimmy still doesn't have the word.

“They're bad.”

“They're not bad! They just need butter! Less time in the oven.” Jimmy studies the shade of cooked brown on his own piece. “More time in the oven.”

Amelia sighs. “You're kind, Jimmy Novak, but there's a knack to this I just don't have.”

“It’s not that! The way you handled the stretched dough was perfection, I mean it! But this is weird, though. I’m beginning to think we might be cursed.”

“Cursed?”

“Or...” There is a new thought in Jimmy Novak’s head, then. “Haunted, or something.”

  
**X-X-X-X-X-X-X-X-X-X-X-X-X-X-X-X-X-X-X-X-X**   


When the lights die down in the windows and the street outside is still, Jimmy locks the doors and sets out his ingredients. Eggs. Milk. Buttermilk. Three drops of distilled water. The angel is upon him at once, the sound of ripping wax parchment paper giving way to a hundred-engine hum and the roar of tires over asphalt lines. The memory is strange one, and its suddenness is confusing. Jimmy can barely hold the bowl still. He grasps for a spoon with a hand that isn't his. For a few hours in the early nineties, he had been---Jimmy remembers now---a traffic jam. He had been great and terrible: two miles long, a clog of tired rush-hour drivers packed into the shape of a celestial mind. Horns honking. The full bandwave of radio stations. He remembers inching along, the clarity of his thought solidifying as he became an entity in the flow of cars on the highway. But there is no anger in it, no frustration, none at all.

“Do you understand?” the angel asks.

“No...” Jimmy measures out the vanilla by the cap, reaches for the sugar.

“Time forward. The together.”

Jimmy stirs, and Castiel becomes more articulate.

“You understand it already.”

“Understand.... wait, what?” Jimmy grinds the syrup and the butter with a fork, scraping the smaller glass bowl. The oil is still lukewarm. The blue of the gas igniter flares on a back corner of the stove.

“Four failed recipes, hours of useless oven fire, inedible lumps I would not feed Lucifer and you're going to invite her back tomorrow.”

Jimmy almost spills the egg mixture. “You think I _shouldn't_?”

The angel doesn't say anything.

“She's doing fine! Honey biscuits are hard, anyways. I mean, they can be.”

Castiel makes no reply.

Jimmy is tempted to add an admonitory shake of pepper to the batter, but he doesn't want to send the angel off.

“Cas... what do you mean?”

But the oil is only liquid, and the language of starch and heat and sweetener is indecipherable. Jimmy turns off the stove, and then the light, and then heads home.

  
**X-X-X-X-X-X-X-X-X-X-X-X-X-X-X-X-X-X-X-X-X**   


That night, his dreams are vivid, ancient things. He is a singing note, a kind of math to describe a curve, a plume of nuclear fire on the sun. They do not last. Jimmy sits up in bed, his head woozy with sleep, and replays the memory of the recipe in his mind. There is a smooth and fearful wonder in him, running over everything. Can he really be this happy?

  
**X-X-X-X-X-X-X-X-X-X-X-X-X-X-X-X-X-X-X-X-X**   


Jimmy Novak has been in love. When he was a cadenza, he loved the music that shaped the cry of his notes. He loved the sum of sound he created and changed before it was written, glossolalia melodies of adoration. He loved his allotted six measures in the hymn, and the surrender to the main line, and he loved all that listened and took up the song.

The devils have lost. In what but love could a free thing give so much?

  
**X-X-X-X-X-X-X-X-X-X-X-X-X-X-X-X-X-X-X-X-X**   


Amelia holds the spoon carefully over the mixing bowl, balanced, breathing in. Eggs. Milk. Buttermilk. Three drops of distilled water. Jimmy waits for the rise of undoing, like temperature, but they remain human in the kitchen, the bubbles of the oil sneaking up on both of them. He guides her hands through the soft kneading. She touches his cheek, her hands flour-dry, and he understands it. This is the present. _This_ is the recipe, this sharing, the angel itself.

He feeds her the first bite.

“It's heavenly.”

And then Jimmy kisses her and---yes---it's true.


End file.
